Talking Heads “Little Creatures”

sfilzen — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 21:41:40 +0000

Talking Heads “Little Creatures” 1985. Today, February 21st, is Talking Heads guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison’s 70th birthday (b. 1949). Harrison is originally from Milwaukee (our home) and this LP originally resided at WKTI, a radio station here that used to play Top 40 hits but now plays country music, I think.

Little Creatures was Talking Heads’ 6th studio LP and while still kinda new wave/post punk, incorporates world music and Americana elements. It hit #20 on the US album charts and went to #10 in the UK. Talking Heads released three singles from the album: “The Lady Don’t Mind,” “Road to Nowhere” and “And She Was.” I haven’t listened to this album in forever, but those songs are still so great! I’m not sure if “The Lady Don’t Mind” charted but “Road to Nowhere” was pretty popular (and got a lot of airtime on MTV if I remember correctly, that image of David Byrne weirdly running burned into my brain) and went to #25 on the US Mainstream Rock chart and to #6 in the UK. “And She Was” is so exuberant! Apparently it’s about a hippie girl David Byrne used to know who tripped out on acid and described feeling like she was flying. The track went to #54 on the US singles chart and to #17 in the UK. I feel like “Stay Up Late” was also a single – it has its own official video – but I’m not totally sure about that one.

Allmusic says about Little Creatures “Talking Heads’ most immediately accessible album, Little Creatures eschewed the pattern of recent Heads albums, in which instrumental tracks had been worked up from riffs and grooves, after which David Byrne improvised melodies and lyrics. The songs on Little Creatures, most of which were credited to Byrne alone (with the band credited only with arrangements) sounded like they’d been written as songs. Perhaps as one result, the band had been streamlined, with extra musicians used only for specific effects rather than playing along as an ensemble. Byrne, who was singing in his natural range for once, frequently was augmented with backup singers. The overall result: ear candy. Little Creatures was a pop album, and an accomplished one, by a band that knew what it was doing…Little Creatures was, in a sense, Talking Heads lite. It was hard to think of this as the same band that produced “Psycho Killer.” But for the band’s expanding audience, who made this their second platinum album, that was okay. And their popularity was being accomplished with no diminution in their creativity.”

The post Talking Heads “Little Creatures” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.

Talking Heads “Remain In Light”

sfilzen — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 20:03:15 +0000

Talking Heads “Remain In Light” 1980. It’s Milwaukee-native and Talking Heads member Jerry Harrison’s birthday today, February 21st (b. 1949). On Remain In Light, he gets musicianship credit for guitar, bass, keyboards and percussion (really, all band personnel seem to share multiple musical responsibilities, as does producer Brian Eno). The album is very art-meets-science rock, intellectual post punk steeped in complex Afrobeat rhythms (specifically Fela Kuti of Nigeria), American funk and the newly emerging hip hop scene via tape loops and sampling. The album reached #19 on the US Billboard chart and in 1989 Rolling Stone named it the 4th best record of the 80′s and in 2015 placed at #129 in the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list. Two singles came from Remain in Light: “Houses in Motion,” which failed to chart in the US but hit #50 in the UK, and “Once in a Lifetime” which charted at #14 in the UK and, kind of to my shock, only #103 in the US. I swear I heard it A LOT in the early 80′s (i.e. I can still sing along to the lyrics now in 2017, but it could be because of its inclusion in the concert film Stop Making Sense). Also notable is the opening track, “Born Under Punches” (with the great lines “Take a look at these hands. The hand speaks. The hand of a government man. Well I’m a tumbler. Born under punches”) and the epic “The Great Curve,” which “includes [King Crimson guitarist’s] Adrian Belew’s synthesiser-treated guitar, African-inspired percussion, and brass interludes.”

The post Talking Heads “Remain In Light” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.

jerry harrison Archives - Vinyl From The Vault

Talking Heads “Little Creatures”

Talking Heads “Remain In Light”